Page 180 - Rainbow County and Other Stories

168 Jack Fritscher

sutures and catheters and probes and enormous enemas adminis-
tered by inexpe ri enced health care workers who would benefit
from the chance to practice.
Delaware, Peter had noted in a newspaper clip ping, had
reinstated the whipping post for teenage delinquents. A young
guy whipped by a burly guard in the semi-public setting of a
county jail courtyard learns a lesson on his stripped back that no
amount of probation or juvenile-hall time could ever teach. And
he’d learn it without being corrupted by spending ninety days
with worse bad boys who’d tutor him into the truly finer points
of delinquency. In addition, a twenty-minute flogging is cheaper
for the taxpayers who then do not have to support the juvenile
delinquent for the term of his sen tence. Peter liked the idea of
swift and defined justice meted out in corporal punishment to the
men and boys convict ed of nonviolent crimes like bouncing bad
checks, or offend ing the public decency, or hitchhiking.
For the violent criminal, Peter had other thoughts. Instead of
executions that waste a convict’s healthy body, he favored harvest-
ing a criminal’s body parts for trans plants to those in need. Gary
Gilmore, condemned to death in Utah, should not have been
strapped into a wooden chair, hooded, and executed—wasted,
literal ly—by rifle fire. Gary Gilmore should have been slowly
harvest ed. First his eyes, then his inner ear mechanism, his kid-
neys and lungs one at a time, his skin, and finally his heart.
Once society fully adjusts to the morality of transplants,
people must adjust to the desirability of Ultimate Har vest as
a legitimate corporal punishment where the entire body of the
criminal pays off his debt to society.
The men at S&M Ranch, led by Whipmaster Dogg Katz,
had left San Francis co with the cloning of the Castro. They were
advance guard of the exodus north where same-as/same-as men
could still pass as unlabeled men among the rough-and-tumble
redneck straight breeders in their boot jeans, down vests, CAT
caps, and 4WD trucks. The brotherhood at S&M Ranch had
retreat ed away from the incestuous urbanity of City slickers
whose horizon was no higher than the skyline of the Castro. They
had re turned to live among the kind of men who had made them
prefer men in the first place. They had by choice abandoned the

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